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If the vocal sounds suddenly huge and dominating on one track compared with the best mix, then go back to the mix and lower the vocal track by a few dB until it sounds proportional. Don't change it's volume, change the volume of the other songs to suit it. And use the best mix as your reference point. Don't sweat the levels or digital overs or anything like that just yet, just get all the tracks so they seem to have the correct proportional loudness, as though they were being played in order by an actual band. Use your "best mix" as a reference, turning the other songs up or down so that they seem proportionate to the best mix and also to the songs before and after one another.
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If a ballad seems louder than a rocker, then turn down the ballad or turn up the rocker 'till they seem proportionate. Do NOT, at this stage, compare any individual song with a commercially-mastered CD. The other songs should compare favorably in an A/B test with that one. When in doubt, use the above-selected "best mix" as a reference. We are going to make some very basic adjustments to try and get them all to sound good in comparison with each other. Play them all back and listen, focusing on the transitions between songs, and A/Bing each song against the "best mix" frequently. Now turn the level of your monitors up to a normal listening volume (RMS level of 83dB SPL is industry-standard, about as loud as city traffic or a noisy restaurant).
MASTERING TIPS CUBASE 5 SOFTWARE
Set the master out of your software low enough so that you have plenty of headroom, maybe like -12~18dB or so- don't worry about the level just yet, just make sure that you have it quiet enough that you are going to hear the whole thing with no clipping, either at the converters, your amplifier, or the speakers, even if you have turn things up here and there. Space them far enough apart that you will have room to move them back and forth a little. Load all the tracks in the order you think you want them to appear on the record, and put them in one stereo track of one project in your software, but keep them as separate clips of audio. Home mastering Stage 1 Here, we are ONLY concerned about how the songs sound in relation to one another- ignore everything else: Keep track of which one is the best-mixed, since we will use it later as a reference. Your friends and family may give you skewed advice on the quality of your material (some will say that everything is brilliant, others find fault with anything), but if you ask them which one sounds the best-recorded or most professional, they will probably give you pretty consistent answers. We'll fix those in the mastering stage.ĭetermine which song is the best-mixed, and which translates best on different sound systems. Just leave the intro/outro noise and silence in the track. Do not include fade ins/fade outs in the mix. If you can't afford to send your mixes to a mastering engineer, then there a couple of very basic things you can do on your own to make your CD a little more listener-friendly:īounce all the songs to 24-bit stereo clips, making absolutely sure that you have no digital overs on the main outs. They make corrections to compensate for inadequacies in the mixing engineer's listening environment, monitoring setup, hearing ability, and so on. Mastering engineers are people who specialize in doing what the mix engineer cannot do. If the mix doesn't sound good enough to be called a master, then fix the mix. Let me start off by saying that Yep is one of the most educated audio/recording engineers inĭon't master your own mixes.